For the last two decades, Wood’s columns in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and the London Review of Books have shaped taste and rattled reputations. Often exhilarating, sometimes ferocious, Wood’s reviews consistently enhance the status of the novel. For him, it is ‘the nearest thing to life’. When Wood came to New York from London in 1995, he had a formidable record as chief literary critic of the Guardian and a judge for the Booker Prize. Aged only thirty, he became senior editor for The New Republic. He now writes for The New Yorker and teaches literary criticism at Harvard.

Early on, Wood was described in The New York Times magazine as ‘very smart and very grouchy’. He had questioned the popular acclaim roused by such bulky novels as Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Wood’s phrase ‘hysterical realism’ hit home with Zadie Smith, who publicly confessed to some ‘overblown manic prose’. Others whom Wood has found wanting are Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. Summing up DeLillo’s Underworld, he wrote that ‘there are no human beings in this novel, no one who really matters and whose consciousness matters to himself’.

Wood believes that novelists should stop trying to explain the seismic events of the day in look-at-me prose and tell us quietly ‘how somebody felt about something’. His new novel sets out to do just that.

At one level, Upstate is an Anglo-American story. Its central figure, through whose consciousness most of the novel’s events are refracted, is Alan Querry, a Northumberland property developer in his sixties who knows almost nothing of life in the United States. Summoned to an upstate New York university town, where his forty-year-old daughter, Vanessa, a philosophy lecturer, is believed to have made a suicide attempt, Alan confronts his role as father. He is joined by his second daughter, Helen, and by Vanessa’s boyfriend, Josh. Alan looks back at his failed marriage to Vanessa and Helen’s mother, and weighs the possible effects of his second marriage. In the immediate crisis, the unknown factor is Josh. Younger than Vanessa, not anchored in a career, he may find her recurring depressive episodes too much for him.

Alan and Helen watch Vanessa and Josh. All four of them consider, at differing levels of awareness, the existential questions of living. Josh isn’t interested in finding reasons to live. ‘It should be how and what and if’, he says, ‘not why.’ Cloistered together in Vanessa’s house, the four become irritable. While clearing plates from the dinner table, Vanessa drops a bowl, chipping a small piece from the rim. ‘My favorite bowl!’ she laments, ‘the only one I cared about.’ Alan, Josh, and Helen tell her that it can be repaired. Their common-sense approach angers Vanessa:

‘It’s not the bowl … it’s the idea: everything that is most dear to you will eventually be taken from you.’

‘Then that’s a very important lesson to learn’, said Helen without emotion.

James Wood (photo by Hans Glave)Sisterly aggression is not allowed to get out of control. ‘“All right, I’m going for a little walk”, said Alan, who took his coat and woollen cap and almost ran for the door.’ There is an unmissable reminder of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, in which another quartet waits and watches. James’s characters are attuned to emotional subtleties. Alan is out of his depth. His bewildered reaction to his daughter’s crisis is movingly shown, but, as the days pass and nothing happens to resolve the situation, the reader has to put up with his platitudes about American culture. Wood is both protective and patronising about Alan’s bad jokes and puns, and his collection of local trade names such as the Scooby Don’t restaurant and an IT business, Only Connect.

The family relationships are finely observed. Alan ponders the mystery of his two daughters. He asks why Helen is (or appears to be) a confident businesswoman, wife, and mother, while for Vanessa the simplest act is fraught with tremulous self-doubt. Is it his duty as a father to stay and support Vanessa if Josh leaves her?

Wood values stillness and silence. In Upstate, there is no external act more violent than the moment in which Vanessa drops her precious bowl. The novel’s free indirect narration works well when it moves between the characters, but too much of it is entrusted to the relentlessly cheerful Alan.

On the last page, Alan’s reverie on the seasonal moods and colours of the English and American landscapes reveals an unlikely poetic sensibility. This is surely Wood’s own voice. The authorial shift may be inconsistent, but it closes the book with the verbal richness that Wood’s quartet has too sparingly provided.